After 18 years of maintaining his innocence, infamous Sounds murderer, Scott Watson has broken his silence for the first time in an interview with North & South magazine.
The man convicted for the deaths of Marlborough teenagers Ben Smart and Olivia Hope doesn’t hold back in sharing his side of the story throughout the 17-page feature. A story the authorities tried to prevent from happening.
“They’ve basically dumped me in jail for half my lifetime, it must be coming up, for something I haven’t done. It’s destroyed my family and my life,” says Watson. “I don’t know where Ben and Olivia are. I’ve never met them, never seen them. They definitely never came on my boat and I definitely didn’t murder them.”
Ben Smart and Olivia Hope saw in the New Year at Furneaux Lodge in the Marlborough Sounds, but disappeared hours later. Their bodies have never been found.
Watson maintains it was a case of ‘wrong place, wrong time’, expressing his shock at finding himself the main suspect in the case which remains one of the most controversial in New Zealand’s history.
“I think it was because I had a criminal record and I was at Furneaux [Lodge – where the teenagers went missing] alone and I left alone. Basically I was an easy target for them. I was the easiest person that they could pick,” says Watson.
June 1998: Scott Watson is taken to the Christchurch District Court in a police car before being charged with the murder of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope.
The North & South story, written by Mike White, who has reported on the case since the very beginning, covers what happened that fateful night, Watson’s teenage crimes, his experience of the trial and his years in jail. It also offers a unique new insight into the perplexing case that divided New Zealand.
“You don’t judge a person on how you perceive them,” says White, who has also covered the Mark Lundy case in-depth.
“You judge them on what you know of the case and the evidence you can rely on. Into that, we can now add what Scott Watson has said. The only thing that I can say is that nothing he told me in Rolleston Prison [where Watson is incarcerated] has eased my enormous disquiet about this case and the many, many flaws and holes in it.
Scott Watson’s boat Blade, by Anna Crichton.
“None of this is done to cause distress to the victims’ families or to ‘dredge up old cases’ as is commonly suggested. It’s done because our justice system isn’t infallible and we must be as certain as we possibly can that the right person is convicted of the right crime. That’s why – 18 years after hearing on my car radio one January morning in 1998 that two local kids had gone missing and it wasn’t normal behaviour for them – I ended up talking to the man held responsible for their murders.”
Read the full story in North & South on sale Monday, November 16.
